Abstract
[full article, abstract in English; only abstract in Lithuanian]
 
 While scholars and popular writers often stress individual responsibility as a way of saving nature, there is a growing understanding that “doing one’s bit” may not be enough to address local and global environmental issues. Focusing on the concept of ecological citizenship as a starting point, our paper seeks to explore the concept of ecological citizenship and show how individualized experiences and socially and culturally embedded practices of care for the environment relate to civic engagement. We connect ecological citizenship with the ethics of care and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which links individual experience of embodied care for environment with broader political and social issues. We argue that the perspective of the ethics of care informed by the concept of habitus broadens the concept of ecological citizenship by, on the one hand, highlighting the rational responsibility to care, and, on the other hand, by revealing how affect-based ties to the environment and established habits of caring are cultivated in local communities. Ecological citizenship based on the habitus of care can be seen as exercised in participation in the public sphere and also through caring practices where public and private fields overlap.
Highlights
As a concept, ecological citizenship has been used by philosophers and sociologists to examine the ways in which society comes to terms with environmental issues it faces.1 While scholars and popular writers problematic because it diminishes “the potential for citizenship to be positive force in counter-hegemonic green politics” when we need more “public spaces that enable citizen to act qua citizen, where they enact being a citizen as something distinct from being a parent, worker, and consumer” (MacGregor 2016: 620)
A need to articulate the concept of environmental citizenship, which is closely tied to the ideas of public space and rational debates, brings us to the Habermasian discourse ethics, which could be seen as a viable tool to approach the formation of the ecologically sustainable society, Jurgen Habermas himself has argued that environmental “challenges are largely abstract and require technical and economic solutions that must, in turn, be planed globally and implemented by administrative means” (Habermas 1981: 35)
The second set of arguments have been developed by feminist philosopher Sherilyn MacGregor, who brought into conversation feminism and environmentalism as to avoid the perils of ecofeminism based on maternalistic interpretations of care (MacGregor 2006)
Summary
Liberal and republican models of citizenship are often considered as opposing each other: the former is based on rights, while the latter emphasizes responsibilities and obligations. The following section seeks to reconcile MacGregor’s political understanding of citizenship with the ethical issues surrounding environmental care by focusing on practice and embodied experiences of care In her explanation of why she turns to citizenship, MacGregor claims that there is a need for a different approach to environmental policies that “can best be realized through acting in public, in local political spaces, as citizens” (2014: 630). Habermas thinks that human responsibility for plants and animals cannot be derived from duties of interaction, as members of ecosystems cannot participate in moral deliberation, deliberations carried in public space by rational, equal and free agents do not exhaust the ethical vocabulary of ecological citizenship Both reason and affect, according to Habermas’s rational universalism, are molded in agreement with ubiquitous rules of manifold communicative performance forcing more or less reliable discrimination between the emotional and the rational, irreducibly affective care and epistemic knowledge, egalitarian emancipation and oppressive restraint. Dobson’s and MacGregor’s definition of ecological citizenship is rooted in a rational discursive paradigm, which undervalues bodily and relational practices and the affect that surrounds caring for the environment and plays an important part in civic engagement
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